Marketing can be just like a regular computer and your contact database is a part of it. And like any computer, it’s not cool when the whole thing starts to lag. Forcing your campaign to work with a glitchy database is only going to slow it down as it mixes in successful leads with bounce backs, wrong numbers, and all other kinds of dead-end errors.

Cliché as this may sound; real love thrives beyond Valentine’s Day. In the same way, real business connections should grow more valuable after they are made. Leads and appointments aren’t one-night stands. Having many ‘connections’ doesn’t guarantee you anything. Unfortunately, there are still marketers who treat the appointment setting process as if it were a production line of potential customers.

If you were in the shoes of that potential customer, how would you feel? Not too hot. In fact, there those who even equate this with the slave trade. Yes everyone has quotas to meet. (You have your marketers, your salespeople, and ultimately everyone else who has a stake in your revenue.) That’s still no excuse to deny the humanity of those you’re making B2B connections with. Marketers are expected to be professionals, not professional skirt chasers.

As Christmas time nears, it’s nice to remember that Santa Claus is quite the list builder himself! You may not see prospects as either naughty or nice but not even St. Nick would make his list too simple when he’s got so many places to go!

You’ve probably seen the cliché a couple times. A certain group of celebs or major players receive a mysterious invitation to participate in an event. Normally, this would be a set up for some horror or mystery book but in real life, this little trope can useful in event marketing.

Android phones and Apple’s iPhones have revolutionized the use of internet. It is hard to believe that only a decade ago people would have to sit down in front of a desktop just to get online. Nowadays, browsing, surfing, posting pics, and checking emails can all be done practically anywhere. There’s also the contribution of WiFi.

All these new conveniences further narrow the gap between people on the go, whether its work associates or family members. Speaking of the former though, that only means you can expect big change in marketing because of the new ways people communicate.

If Google succeeds at becoming the ‘third half of your brain’, then it’s probably going to be pretty empty. You see, despite our utter dependence on the almighty search engines, Google and the rest of the gang merely scratch the surface of the Web — literally. Right now, search engine crawlers are only able to access and index less than 10% of the world’s half-a-trillion public web pages. The remaining 90% belong to a place called the Deep Web’.

As it turns out, the way pages and information are organized and made available on the Deep Web has a lot to teach us about optimizing our sites here on the surface. So, let’s take a deep dive and see what we can learn.

One of the many requirements in B2B lead generation is to have a manageable and stable contact list. These lists are used by your company’s teams to see if there are any possible clients they need to contact. (They can contain information like their name, address, affiliates, annual revenue, number of employees and other important data.)

Most often, people presume the horror monsters that do the dirtiest kills are zombies, vampires, or serial killers like Leatherface. However, when it comes to ghosts, movies like Thir13en Ghosts, The Grudge and, quite recently, Insidious 2 still do a really good job of showing how murderous they can be.

Despite that though, there are some things about them that you shouldn’t forget. And on that note, these same things shouldn’t be forgotten when you’re trying to recover lost/dead leads.

In terms of email deliverability, things aren’t really going all that well for marketers around the world. Return Path says inbox placement rates have declined from 82% last year to 78% in the first half of 2013. That’s almost 1 in every 4 emails not reaching the inbox. But there’s one thing you can do to buck this trend, and it involves enhancing your sender reputation.